Notes and Editorial Reviews

This is Debussy in the great French tradition, the sort of playing and conducting that used to be associated with national schools of performance. Of course, Stéphane Denève comes from the right school, but you have to care enough about it to cultivate the aesthetic, and for much of the 20th century French musical institutions did their best to trash everything that was great in the pre-War style. The situation with orchestras was even worse. Not that French orchestras were great in a technical sense; largely they were not, but they were distinctive in a way that was particularly well suited to French repertoire, and they contained superb individual players. This is why orchestras withRead more a similar sonority, such as the Czech Philharmonic, with lean strings and prominent, colorful winds, often with a touch of tangy vibrato in the brass, play the music so well to this day.

What Denève has done is recreate this sonority in his Debussy performances, and the result is marvelous. This is no mean feat. Today’s orchestras do not naturally take to this style of playing, but this less blended, more individual approach was in fact the “authentic” sound of the late 19th and early 20th century. Debussy orchestrates in layers, and however fuzzy or “impressionistic” the resultant sonority, these layers should remain distinct. This means that woodwind timbres must often balance the strings, as they do in this performance of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, with tellingly supple results. Jeux, that miracle of slithery half-tints and suggestions, really speaks in this performance; it becomes a genuine dance drama rather than a mere abstraction.

Much of Denève’s success also stems from his consistently lively, flowing tempo choices. These Nuages float across the sky with a welcome sense of purpose and emotional point. The concentration of the Scottish wind players here, and throughout the three Images, is particularly impressive. Iberia’s three movements cohere as a single span—clearly Debussy’s intention, but something we seldom actually hear either in concert or on disc. And as for La Mer, well, it’s just as exciting as hell. Try the closing bars in the sample below. The art of playing loud while retaining the integrity of Debussy’s carefully balanced textures is another of those virtually lost arts happily recaptured here.

Chandos has provided terrific SACD multichannel sonics for this production, which may well be headed straight for reference status. A major achievement.